It seems as if I'm going through a new phase in my life. No, it's not about being 30 and thus having a kind of midlife crisis, but it's all about the alarming amount of hospital visits I have on my tailored Oyster card.
It all started a month ago, when my grandma had to undergo an emergency surgery. She was in a coma for five days and on the ICU for two and a half weeks, and now she's getting better, albeit slowly and with careful baby steps. Either way, I prefer that, because then the chances that she'll recover completely are a lot bigger. My grandma has been in the hospital for more than a month now, and she's regained some of her strength, but I'm still a little bit suspicious when it comes to complete recovery. She's lost about 20 pounds - and that's a rough guess - and she has aged quite a lot. However, I support her as much as I can by visiting her on a daily basis. Until today, because today my tailored Oyster card led me to another place.
Today, my mom, had to undergo a complicated back surgery. We had to be in the hospital at 7 AM, which meant madrugar (Spanish word for getting up very, very early - beautiful, isn't it? I mean, the word of course, not exactly the action itself...) because the hospital, which has a renowned specialist for this kind of operations, requires a 40 minute drive from my home town, so I woke up at 5.30 AM and got up a quarter of an hour later. Normally I'm not that kind of person and I easily get headaches after getting up so early, but until now, I've been fine, just fine :) My mom, on the other hand, is a little bit worse, because she's in a lot of pain. Right now, she's asleep, which is better, but when she's awake, she's in terrible pain. I hope they can do something about it!
Either way, I don't really like my tailored Oyster card. I'd rather get the usual one, so I can visit London one day - finally! However, at the moment, my Oyster card has been reprogrammed to hospitals instead of the London tube, and that's not exactly something good. I haven't visited hospitals on such a frequent basis in my entire life! And both these operations were kind of unexpected... I have been in psychiatric hospitals for an extensive period of time, but that's still different, very different indeed. A surgery is a completely different story.
So for now, people, I'm off. Please keep my mom and grandma in your thoughts. Both of them still have a long way to go. And when I say long, I mean long, very long. Keep those fingers crossed!
Well, I do now. I've seen it with my own eyes. I'd heard about it before, alright, I'd even seen some proof, but did I truly believe in a miracle of God? No, I didn't. I was that skeptical christian, the one that does believe in God, but that thinks that miracles and true healings belong to the past, when Jesus Christ still put his footprints in the sand of the old land of Israel.
However, as you might have read in an earlier post, my grandma is pretty ill. Three weeks ago, my parents and I challenged the speed limits on the Dutch and Belgian roads to be with her. However, when we arrived, she was already - or should I say still? - in surgery, and we had to wait. In the meantime, we had to try to divert my granddad, who was at that moment the most pessimistic person I'd ever met. He was convinced that my grandma was already dead, while we tried to reassure him by telling him we would certainly receive a phone call if something went wrong. As there came no phone call, we regained our trust in the surgeons, while my granddad sank away in an even bigger despair. Finally, the long-awaited phone call came: we could visit my grandma in the ICU.
There she was lying, eyes closed, machines and tubes all around her. Breathing, yes, but with the help of a machine. Alive, yes, but with the help of the machines. Our hopes shrank. Mine didn't yet disappear, that is, until we heard the verdict: my grandma was terribly ill, poisoned by her own kidneys and intestines that had stopped working from one moment to the other, and the first 48 hours would be critical, very critical indeed. And even after those first 48 hours had passed, there was still the risk of complications, a whole list of them. So I started praying, I tried to convince my God, a God of provision, that He had to keep my grandma alive. I would cast my hopes on Him, I would accept that He is the Lord, that He is the one who decides when the moment has come, if He just could keep my grandma alive. I also knew that there was somehow a way to convince Him that He really should keep her alive, I just knew. And there I felt that tiny shred of hope I wrote about in an earlier post.
Then things started happening. The first 24 hours passed and I started praying to the Lord. The next 24 hours passed, which made 48, and I kept praying to the Lord. The situation remained critical but stable, as it had been on day 1. On day 2, we thougth we'd seen her move her eyes somewhat, but in the end, maybe we'd just imagined that. Or not? The nurses took away our regained hope. We told them she'd moved her eyes. They said it were just muscle movements, nothing more or less. Still, I kept praying to God, and I asked Him to give us more signs of my grandma regaining consciousnesss. God heard my prayers, and on day 4, my cousin, who is also my grandma's personal nurse, celebrated her 23th birthday. I knew that under the given circumstances, she didn't want to celebrate, so the night before, I asked the Lord if He could just give us back that tiny shred of hope, no matter what the nurses said. And, believe me or not, but that morning, the morning of day 4, my grandma opened her eyes. It wasn't much, it wasn't very convincing to be honest, but she did open her eyes for a few milliseconds. And once again. A few times she did open her eyes, very slowly, for a very short time, but in a convincing way. From that day on, I started praying to God whenever and wherever I could. I asked Him to do me and my family a huge favour, and I truly believed that God would provide my family with a miracle. The fact that my grandma had survived the first 48 hours was a miracle, the fact that she'd opened her eyes was another one. I prayed even more vigorously, because I knew that in the end, all would be well and that my grandma would survive this.
It turned out that my grandma was in a coma for 5 and a half days, but on day 6, she was back with us, and that was another true miracle. There were still the machines, breathing instead of her, but there she was, once again. She was strong, stronger than all of us together. My granddad couldn't be convinced. In his eyes, she was as dead as could be, even though I made him touch her warm hand, showed him her chest going up and down and her vitals that were more or less stable. He just couldn't and didn't want to believe it.
I prayed at her bed when she was still in a coma. Three times. I prayed at home, in my bed, every night. It worked. God answered all of my prayers. On day 7, she started breathing without the help of the machines. On day 9, they stopped the dialysis. And finally, after two and a half weeks, her vitals kept getting better and she could leave the ICU. My granddad was and is still very emotional, and as a matter of fact, it seems that my grandma is the stronger one of the two. Below, you see a picture of the two of them, made just two days ago: granddad a little more optimistic, grandma recovering from a serious and life-threatening operation. I'm so proud of the both of them, for dealing with this situation the best they can.
Now I dare you, dear skeptical, maybe even atheist reader. Do you still deny that miracles can happen? Everyone in our family says this is quite a miracle, and even the doctors didn't dare to believe that this could and would happen. When we asked them about her chances of surival, they only answered in an avoiding way: "Well, it's an old woman..."
I'm writing this testimony in the name of Jesus Christ, and my Lord, His Father, just like I'd promised Him. I do believe in miracles now. In fact, I'm praying for a new miracle, as my mom has to undergo neurosurgery, a complicated surgery that involves the nerves in her spine, within a week. Please people, stand by me and light a candle, as my mom has to be as strong as her mom has been the last three weeks. A mere three weeks have passed, and look how my grandmother's situation has improved. It really happened in an incredible way. I hope my mom will recover evenly well. Please, keep those candles burning, people!
